If you only have time to watch one session my pick for the SharePoint/Office Developer would be Accelerate your digital transformation with SharePoint and OneDrive presented by Jeff Teper, Dan Holme, Omar Shahine, Naomi Moneypenny. This session was just non-stop announcements on what’s new in SharePoint, Office and OneDrive. Some of the announcements:

Office 2019 is coming (Office clients, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business servers – all servers to be available on-prem) – preview due mid 2018

One of the more complex areas of doing modern Office development is authentication and authorization (especially when connection back into Office 365 services). This story is becoming a lot simpler if you can go exclusively through the Graph API. Vittorio Bertocci did a very entertaining session (Office development: Authentication demystified) that really shows you an on-rails experience for how to accomplish this from many different technologies and context. It is well worth a watch and has the potential to save you a lot of time and head scratching. This area of Office development has changed drastically over the last couple of years and there is a lot of conflicting information on the web and much of it is out of date.

Microsoft’s premier technology conference Microsoft Ignite 2017 is quickly approaching and it’s set to be the largest Ignite conference yet (rumoured to be around 24,000 attendees).

OnePlace Solutions – Products that rock this world

I’m excited to be attending again with some of the awesome OnePlace Solutions team. OnePlace Solutions is again a sponsor and exhibitor at the conference so please come by and pay us a visit on the expo floor (booth 1724). We will be running live demos of our desktop product suite (a major release went out for this last week so you will be seeing brand new software) including OnePlaceMail, OnePlaceDocs, and OnePlaceLive.

Fun & Giveaways – that are out of this world

Who doesn’t like building LEGO and winning prizes? Come and play our Lego game for your chance to win the LEGO® NASA Apollo Saturn V

What’s at the Conference for Office Developers?

Heaps, and heaps, and heaps. Trying to build a schedule in MyIgnite website is overwhelming with the shear number of sessions available BUT IT IS ALSO A MUST – don’t try to figure it out on the day, it will take a couple of hours to really look through the options and choose the right sessions for yourself. The conference centre is huge, so if you end up in the wrong session you could have a 30 minute walk to get to another session, not a situation you want to find yourself in. Here’s my picks for Office developers:

Learn about the latest that Office 365 has to offer developers and power users, from Microsoft Teams extensibility and the Microsoft Graph to Office add-ins and Office UI Fabric. We cover the full range of solution-building tools, from Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Get a demo-packed overview of the platform, and a guide to Office sessions you should see through the rest of the conference.

Microsoft Office Add-ins allow you to make your solution a native part of Office on every platform across desktop, web, and mobile applications. Learn how to build an Office Add-in, the new features we’ve recently launched and our future roadmap. This session covers how to enable native Office experiences using standard web developers tools, how your Add-in can run anywhere, and all the great distribution channels for publishing your app.

Building the modern SharePoint experience: Best practices from Microsoft for developing with SPFx

With the SharePoint Framework, you can incorporate modern developer techniques to create fast, responsive components. Building on lessons from developing out-of-the-box components, in this session, we go under the hood to explore details of modern SharePoint client-side development tools to not only manage your developer environment but also give you an edge in building optimized and performant web parts and extensions. We also show how you can streamline deployment with SharePoint CDN facilities to strike the optimal mix of flexibility and performance for your projects.

Migrate your apps from legacy APIs to Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph is the single REST API endpoint for accessing your data in the Microsoft Cloud including from Azure Active Directory, Office 365, Intune, and more. In this session, learn about how Microsoft Graph can now enable you to create apps that were simply not possible before. Find out what is new with Microsoft Graph in addressing previous parity gaps with legacy endpoints, learn about the scenarios that you can build using Graph, and see how you can quickly migrate to using Graph.

Tokens and Scopes and Protocols, Oh My! Come to this session to discover how easy it is to use the MSAL SDK to connect your applications and Office Add-ins to the Microsoft Graph, without any need to become a protocol expert. No matter what platform or dev stack you are targeting, you’ll be surprised by how little code it takes to authenticate users and take advantage of Microsoft’s rich cloud API. We cover a lot of great MSAL-focused tech, including MSAL.NET for UWP, Desktop and Xamarin, MSAL.NET for Agave plug-ins and MSAL JS. We also touch on MSAL for iOS and Android. It goes without saying – but we’ll say it anyway – that we also talk about Microsoft Graph!

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OnePlace Solutions is proud to be an exhibitor and sponsor again this year at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta. Ignite is Microsoft’s premier conference this year for Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Azure, Windows and related technologies.

I’ll be on the OnePlace Solution booth (#563) during the conference talking about our suite of products that bring SharePoint and Office 365 to where you work such as Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat, and Windows Desktop.

I’m very excited to be unveiling our latest product OnePlaceConnect at the conference. OnePlaceConnect is focused on bringing cloud based solutions such as Office 365 and SharePoint directly into the applications you use, on whatever device you use them (yes that means on your iPad/Android tablets, phones, Mac and of course your Windows devices).

Registration is now open to participate in the OnePlaceConnect Preview and be one of the first to get your hands on the new product.

The following are some really useful resources that I often refer people to at conferences.

It’s always fun meeting new people at conferences and hearing of successes, challenges and battle wounds you’ve had with technology. It’s also awesome to catch up with existing customers and partners while I’m in the US as well, so please drop by the OnePlace Solutions booth if you get a chance.

We will have some swag at the booth, and we have new and improved hacky sacks/footbags/juggling balls to give away this conference. I’m more excited than I probably should be about those!

We will also be giving away a Microsoft Band 2, so make sure you drop by for your chance to win.

Have a great conference and hope to see you at the booth or one of the many events.

The excitement is starting to build as the Microsoft technology conference of the year is almost upon us. I feel this year is going to be a first time experience for all attendees. We’ve got many individual conferences combined into one, even the old timers that have been attending these individual conferences year after year may be feeling some renewed excitement and feelings of trepidation of just how this conference is going to play out.

It’s certainly going to get started with a bang as Satya Nadella takes the stage for the keynote to an event that sold out weeks ago. I think the last time we saw a Microsoft CEO take the stage at a SharePoint conference was 5 years ago at SPC2010 when Steve Ballmer was at the helm.

Although Microsoft has gone (almost) all in on the cloud and been pushing cloud at us from every angle over the last few years, I think we will be hearing the word HYBRID quite a bit at this conference. We can also expect to hear a lot more about what SharePoint 2016 will look like and the feature set we can expect out of SharePoint 2016 on premises installations.

During the conference you’ll be able to find me at the OnePlace Solutions booth #537 in the Exhibition Hall. We will be running live, interactive demos of OnePlaceMail, as well as two new products that we are launching at the conference OnePlaceDocs and OnePlaceLive. Email management, Document management, and driving a solution focused, end user engagement for systems built on the SharePoint/Office 365 platform is what we’re about – if that sounds interesting then come by and meet the OnePlace Solutions Team. We will have plenty of giveaways as well so make sure you stop by to claim yours.

If you want to get the most out of mingling and networking then be sure to check out these two great resources for all those official and unofficial parties (great work guys on compiling these lists as they are quite extensive):